


Running In The Family

by queenfanfiction



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Torchwood
Genre: F/F, F/M, Multi, tw_femficfest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-14
Updated: 2011-11-14
Packaged: 2017-10-26 02:19:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/277550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queenfanfiction/pseuds/queenfanfiction
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are many ways in which Alice takes after her father, some of which she appreciates more than others.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Running In The Family

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mcparrot](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=mcparrot).
  * Inspired by [In My Unique Position](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10478) by [NancyBrown](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NancyBrown/pseuds/NancyBrown). 



> Written for TW_FemFicFest 2011, for McParrot of LJ. Based on a combination of two of Parrot's prompts (Alice meeting Jack again, and Alice being a kickarse secret agent), and basically an AU of NancyBrown's "[In My Unique Position](http://nancybrown.livejournal.com/27226.html)". (Fear not, Nancy—it returns to canon by the epilogue!)
> 
>  **Beta Credit JESUS:** SariaGray of LJ beta'ed the hell out of this fic ~~and I think the fic liked it~~.

It's been six months since Steven died, and late one night Alice goes out to the cemetery and kneels before her son's gravestone. She has a bottle of sleeping pills in her left hand and a loaded handgun in her right, and quite frankly she doesn't give a damn which one she uses on herself first.

She's testing the weight of the gun in her hand, admiring her curved mirror image in its glinting metal barrel and remembering the look on her father's face when he'd first given her the gun (for self-defense, he'd said, and that's exactly how she's going to use it—to defend herself from the nightmares and the grief and, over them all, the numbness that's been the whole of her existence for half a year), when a shadow falls over her and blocks out the moon's reflection. Alice looks up, and above her is another woman. The woman's face is darkened by the night's shadows, and the shadows blend well with her ink-black leather outfit.

They watch each other for a long moment in wary silence, before the other woman clears her throat. "I'd use the pills, if I were you," she says, in a friendly, matter-of-fact tone as if she were offering advice on how to clean or cook. "Gun's always messy, and it's awful hard to clean brain matter out of soil, you know."

Alice's fingers clench so tightly around the gun that she's surprised it doesn't fire. "Who are you?"

The woman shrugs, then kneels down so that she's on a level with Alice's face. Alice sees the side of the face now visible in the moonlight, recognizes the dark-skinned woman from the mess that ripped away Alice's only joy six months ago, and recoils. "What do you want from me? I thought I told him never to contact—"

"This has nothing to do with Captain Harkness," the woman interrupts. "He hasn't even been in the country since the 456—well. No, I'm here on my own." She leans closer, until Alice swears she can feel warm air on her own cheek. "To ask you something—a favor, really."

But Alice is already shaking her head. She has a list of everything related to Torchwood that will last her one lifetime and into the next, and doing them favors will never be on that list, never. "No. I don't care what it is—nothing, not ever, _no._ " On impulse, she suddenly brings the gun up and around, until the muzzle is pressed against the other woman's chest. "Get away—right now, or I swear, _I'll shoot._ "

The woman slowly gets back on her feet and backs away, hands in the air. It is only after Alice lowers the gun and turns back to Steven's grave marker that the woman murmurs, "What if you could change it?"

The gun swings back up. "What did you say?"

"Maybe not change what happened," the woman goes on, ignoring Alice. "We can't do that, obviously—not yet, at least. But what if you could change what _will_ happen?" The woman takes a step closer, and Alice's bead on her wavers. "If you could make sure that no one else will suffer like your son did, like _you_ have—would you do it?"

Alice takes one deep shuddering breath, then another, and by the third the pain in her chest has loosened enough for her to rasp, "What the fuck do _you_ think?"

The woman's eyes flicker understanding in the darkness. "I think," she says quietly, "that's a yes." She holds out her hand. "I'm Lois—Lois Habiba, I think we've met. Welcome to Torchwood, Miss—?"

"Just Alice, please," Alice says automatically, and in that moment she sees a flash of light streak down from the winter night sky and strike a hilltop in the distance, and suddenly, for no real reason, she wonders where her father might be and if he would laugh at the irony of her agreeing to work with the very people who got her into this mess in the first place.

She doesn't laugh, though. She only takes Lois' hand when offered and stands, letting the pills fall and scatter over Steven's grave like an offering but keeping the handgun for herself, and when they walk away Alice does not once look back.

* *

The headquarters under the Plass that Alice had heard so much about from her parents' tales is gone now, destroyed by a bomb that had also killed her father—not permanently, of course, though given what had happened after, Alice sometimes wishes it had.

Now, Torchwood meets in a less glamourous location: an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of Penarth, a ghostly metal hulk that the organisation had shanghaied and refitted for their purposes shortly after the 456 were killed and their captain disappeared to God-wonders-where-though-Alice-certainly-doesn't. When Alice runs her hand over the corrugated steel that makes up one wall, she thinks of all the things that Torchwood has shanghaied from her life alone—her father, her mother, her childhood, her _son_ —and allows herself a moment of silent inward rage that, if no one were around, she would vent in a furious scream.

But there is always someone around, because Torchwood never sleeps. Neither does Alice, for that matter—not just because of the nightmares of her holding a dead child, but because there isn't ever any bloody _time_.

Alice isn't even quarter-trained to Gwen's liking when a call comes in, a Weevil attack in an open-air market in broad daylight. Casualties are mounting, the SWAT teams aren't helping much except to create more panic, and Torchwood needs to send the full team out _stat._

Gwen rests one hand on her swollen belly and grimaces. She is the unspoken-yet-mutually-decided leader of their team, but her current condition makes it impossible for her to go out into the field, especially on a wild Weevil hunt. "I don't want to send you, not yet," she tells Alice. Her stomach twitches under her hand when the baby gives a violent kick, and she grimaces again. "You shouldn't have to do this."

"It's fine. I want to," Alice says, and the surprising part is that it's true. It helps to keep herself busy running _towards_ things, because it lets her forget what she's trying to run _away_ from.

She rides in the front passenger seat of Torchwood's SUV (new, black, and with bulletproof windows that Lois installed herself. Alice wouldn't have taken Lois to be a do-it-herself sort of person, but the woman was full of surprises, including a switchblade she'd pulled out of nowhere in the middle of a hand-to-hand fight with a muscular Blowfish, and when Alice asked where the knife had come from Lois just grinned) while Lois drives. Behind Alice sits Johnson, as dark and brooding as the first time they'd set eyes on each other during the 456, and when Alice looks into the rearview mirror she sometimes sees Johnson watching her with careful eyes that flicker with sympathy before darting away to look at something else outside.

Next to Johnson rides Martha Jones, Torchwood's medic, also pregnant but considerably less so than Gwen. She will stay behind in the SUV, coordinating their attack with Gwen from headquarters using the data Gwen uploads by the minute. "Checking earpiece reception," Martha says into her computer's microphone, which echoes a half-second later from the tiny comm speaker hooked into Alice's ear. Communications running, check.

Lois pulls into a deserted alley and kills the engine before yanking on the handbrake. She turns around to find Johnson already pulling out guns from the boot and passing them around to everyone, including Martha. Alice takes hers, checks that it's loaded and not jammed, and nods at Lois, who nods back. Armed and ready, check.

A moment later, something solid bangs against Johnson's side of the SUV, enough to make the vehicle rock dangerously, and Johnson yells something about Lois not being supposed to take them _that_ close to the action. Alice isn't actually sure what Johnson says because her blood is pounding, adrenaline flushing in her veins, and something in the back of her mind sings, _And danger, check and mate._

The next minute or two flies by in a blur of color, motion, and shouts that only come through Alice's mind as static. She knows that she gets out of the car because all of a sudden she is in the middle of the alleyway, facing a Weevil that is a good head taller than her, and Lois is screaming and Johnson is shouting and that's precisely when the Weevil chooses to lunge with a heart-stopping shriek.

Alice doesn't even have the time to raise her gun, so she instead ducks to one side, throwing herself against the alley's wall to get out of the way of the Weevil's oncoming teeth. She manages, but only barely: there is the sound of ripping fabric, followed by a light stinging sensation on her upper arm as the Weevil flies past her, carried by its own momentum down to the far end of the alley a good thirty feet away. Alice swears, spins around on her heel, and fires once before the Weevil has the chance to charge again.

Her bullet nails the creature right between the eyes, a perfect shot. The thing is dead before it even hits the ground.

"Nice shot," says Johnson in Alice's ear. Alice starts and whirls around, but Johnson is only just coming out from behind the SUV, her own gun drawn; it is the comm that had made her sound so close. When she finally looks away from the dead Weevil to Alice, her face is twisted with a grudging admiration. "Practice a lot, then?"

Alice shrugs. "A little," she lies. In truth, she hadn't gone to the gun range except for the one time Gwen had taken her there to introduce her to the concept of handling an automatic weapon for something other than self-injury. Gwen had shown Alice how to hold the gun properly by wrapping her arms around from behind, and the baby had kicked Alice in the small of her back when she didn't adjust her position accordingly.

And then Alice had fired one shot, then another, then four more, and every shot but one ripped a jagged lump of a hole through the dead center of the target. The stray bullet landed an inch lower, the dot on a lopsided exclamation point. Gwen never brought up gun training again.

Before Johnson can say anything, a scream—a human one, this time—rips through the air. Lois dashes around the two of them towards the alley's opening, towards the market where the first Weevil had been spotted. "Martha, get us a location, stat!" she shouts, and Alice winces when the feedback squeal nearly shatters her eardrum.

Johnson sees her wince, and her lips twitch into the closest thing to a grin that Alice has ever seen on her. "Ready?" she asks.

"After you," Alice says, and they run to catch up with Lois, side by side.

They wind up dealing with a total of five Weevils, not including Alice's. They manage to stun three and keep them relatively alive: there is one who nearly tears out Johnson's neck until Alice shoots it dead (again, a near-perfect shot), and Lois shoots another before it can go for a little boy, not much older than Steven and wailing for his mummy, the Weevil's previous victim. Lois turns and sees Alice watching from a good distance away. "Go on back," she tells Alice, the words coming clear through the comm. "I'll take care of this. Martha's waiting."

Alice nods, jerkily, then mechanically makes her way back to the SUV, where Johnson is hauling the three unconscious Weevils into the boot under Martha's direction. When Martha sees Alice, she frowns. "Killing them doesn't really help, you know," she says. "Jack always wanted to keep them alive if he could. He used to—"

"Well, he's not here now, is he?" Alice snaps, yanking her comm out of her ear and chucking it into the backseat petulantly. " _I_ don't take any bloody prisoners."

Martha watches Johnson tug at the feet of one giant heap of a creature for a few moments in silence. When she speaks again, it's much quieter, almost an apology. "He was a good shot, too."

Alice isn't quite sure what to say to that, so she instead joins Martha in watching Johnson finish up. Johnson shoves the last Weevil into the boot and slams the door closed with a meaningful grunt. The door just misses knocking off the Weevil's feet. "For Christ's sake, none of you could've helped me out here, coul—" Johnson breaks off mid-gripe, her eyes wide and staring at Alice's arm. "Christ, Alice, _you're bleeding out!_ "

Alice looks down, surprised. Sure enough, the whole of her right sleeve is stained bright red around the jagged tear in the fabric where the first Weevil had half-bitten her. She'd been so busy chasing after the others that she hadn't felt a thing.

Martha is already ripping away the sleeve to better see the wound, which doesn't bother Alice much since the shirt was ruined anyway; but what does bother her is when Martha stops ripping and stares because, underneath all the blood, the skin on Alice's arm is as unblemished and unbroken as it had been when she'd got out of bed that morning.

Johnson stares, too. "The fuck?" she asks no one in particular, and Alice isn't in a mood to think of an answer to that question, yet, not when she has so many more questions of her own.

Several hours and a dozen obscure medical tests later, Martha has the answer. It's in Alice's blood, the same blood that ruined her shirt—the blood that half of which belongs to Alice's father. It probably isn't enough to make Alice like _him_ (Martha had admitted that there really was no way to prove anything except for the obvious, which no one is willing to bring up even though Alice personally wouldn't mind giving it a shot, no pun intended), but the trait is clearly strong enough in the first generation to keep her from dying of anything short of natural causes.

Alice scratches the skin that should have been torn and bleeding, rubs and rubs until the flesh is red and swollen and inflamed. "And the second generation?" she asks, though she already knows the answer.

Martha looks away and says nothing, but she doesn't need to.

It's Johnson who finds Alice in the pub, three hours after they've all cleaned up and signed out for the evening. Alice is nursing an absinthe, keeping an eye on the replay of the footies from earlier that afternoon, when Johnson slides onto the empty stool next to her. Neither says anything until one team scores, drawing a few half-hearted cheers and boos from the pub's customers scattered around them.

"I wonder," Johnson says without any preamble, "if you hate me as much as you hate him."

Alice downs the rest of her drink and slides the empty glass for another fill, pointedly ignoring both the alcohol's burn and Johnson's presence. "You didn't know," she says, finally, and Johnson nods.

"I'm sorry," Johnson mutters, low enough that Alice for a moment doubts her own hearing, and then, "If it helps, I think—if there had been any other way, he wouldn't have done it."

"I know." Alice takes a sip from her new drink, a gin and tonic this time, and watches two men in a corner booth snog each other senseless, their hands cupping each other's faces as tenderly as Alice had seen Jack do to her mother once, when she was still young and hadn't known that her father would be the one to kill her son. "That's what makes it worse."

Alice knows that there are some things she has inherited from her father, and she has come to accept those things when they help her out in her line of work: her shooting accuracy, her steadiness under fire, the lucky quirk of genetics that gave her some sort of minor power of self-healing—the same quirk that had denied such a power to her own child. And yet when she wakes up the next morning, in a bed that is not hers, suffering from a frightful hangover and with a sleeping Johnson sprawled half-across Alice's bare legs while Lois whistles to herself as she makes coffee in the next room over, Alice has to ask herself if there are other things she inherited from Jack Harkness that she simply takes for granted.

Surprisingly, it doesn't bother her as much as she thought it would, and Alice only sighs before jiggling Johnson's shoulder to wake her and asking herself where in the bloody world she'd left her knickers.

* *

Gwen gives birth inside Torchwood headquarters, which is almost appropriate given the level of dedication the woman had given the organisation in her condition. Alice happens to be there with her, while Lois and Johnson and Martha are out on patrol; and she talks Gwen through the labor with Martha giving instructions over the comm, holding Gwen's hand when instructed and inwardly sympathising when Gwen starts to lay out all the curses in the world (in Welsh) on her unfortunate (and fortunately-absent) husband. It makes Alice think of the creative swearwords she'd invented during her own labor, at which point Gwen cries out from Alice's hand gripping hers so tightly, and Alice is abruptly yanked out of her daydream and back into the present of Martha yelling and Gwen screaming and Lois shouting for everyone to get the hell off her comm-line, thanks ever so.

The baby pops out as quickly as if it had been waiting to come out all along, and when Gwen lets Alice hold the little girl in her arms, it doesn't hurt nearly as much as Alice had expected.

Alice is babysitting Anwen at Gwen and Rhys' home when the second miracle hits, the real one. She'd had a forewarning of it, in a way: she had been slicing carrots in the kitchen that morning when the knife slipped and nicked her thumb, and she'd been almost surprised when the cut, instead of healing before her eyes as she had grown used to, kept right on bleeding as if it had all the time in the world. She hadn't the time to wonder, however, because when she looked up there was a man in Gwen's front garden, waving a badge and shouting something about the CIA before keeling over flat.

It was bad enough that the CIA had seemingly hacked into enough records to find Gwen's off-record home address (Lois would _not_ be pleased to find her decryption work reduced to naught, by the Yanks of all people), but what's worse is when some blasted helicopter starts taking potshots at the house while Alice and Anwen and the CIA man are still inside it, and the worst of all is when Gwen and Rhys return with countering firepower—on the back of a Jeep driven by someone else entirely.

"Easy," Jack says when Alice holds her gun to his head. He holds his hands up in the air. At first, Alice thinks that he's trying to prove he's defenseless, which in her mind seems like a stupid defense in itself; but then she sees the jagged wound on his forearm that matches her own—in that it hasn't healed, either. "I think you'll find that it might stick, this time."

So Alice doesn't shoot him. She also doesn't say anything, once they've been arrested and somehow forced to board an aeroplane that will take them to the States (goddamn _Americans,_ would she never learn to not trust every last smooth-talking bastard who won't bloody _die?_ ), when she watches the sly-looking female agent go in behind the steward and sees (from her angle in the window seat next to Gwen) the agent slip something into Jack's drink. Alice feels a twinge of guilt, but only a little, and it goes away quickly when she reminds herself of what he did and that no one was really sure what the Miracle would do to the two of them, not yet.

It's only when Alice watches her father writhe in his seat, the worst she's ever seen him in all her life and the closest to dying, that the guilt grows and feeds on the sight until it's twisting her gut into impossible knots and it's all she can do to keep herself in her seat, now that Rex (the first Yank she'd met in this mess, and she'd not trust him either if it weren't for the way he kept watching her with half-a-smile and _oh for fuck's sake NO_ ) had uncuffed her.

Gwen looks up from where she is ripping apart the floorboards of the plane, as easily as if they weren't currently flying inside it, and asks Alice, "So are you going to help me, or just sit and watch?"

Alice sighs, and inwardly she gives up the battle for lost. "I'll help," she says, and when she gets up and passes her father she is almost certain she sees him spare her a look, a single flash of gratitude that disappears in the next spasm of agony.

"I've not forgiven you, you know," she tells him once the danger's cleared, leaning closer just before the plane lands and whispering in his ear like she used to when she was a girl. "Don't think this has changed anything."

Jack shifts in his seat, still pale and clearly uncomfortable with how close he brushed by a permanent death. "I know," he says, but Alice can see the hope of redemption in his eyes, and it is still there when he knocks out two crooked Feds with his bare hands and yells for her to _run, just run,_ and when she does Alice knows, as much as she has ever known, that she really is her father's daughter.

* *

_Five months later_

Alice is back before Steven's grave again, but this time it is broad daylight and she bears no weapons, only flowers.

So much has changed since the Miracle was reversed: she and Jack have returned to their states of immortal grace, if one could call it that—hers partially, his permanently, and now Rex has (through no real choice of his own) seemingly joined him. Alice had shared Rex's bed once, with him still inside it and plenty willing despite his Category 1 injury at the time, but she had ignored any of his attempts to contact her since the reversal and the subsequent discovery at Esther's funeral. Alice knows well what comes of dealing with immortal men, from both her own experience and her mother's, and it is never as rosy as the mythology or the folklore describes it. It is, in fact, usually much worse—because the one thing legends are never too keen on telling is what happens to the people who are invariably left behind.

Alice still works for Torchwood, in Cardiff, with Lois and Johnson and Martha (now fully-laden with child and ready to give birth at any moment) to keep her company, both in bed and out of it, as the case may be. Gwen had stayed behind in the States with Jack and Rex to man a new Torchwood branch across the pond, bringing Rhys and Anwen and her mother along with her. Alice doesn't envy her, and the occasional video-call with her father no longer brings bile rising to her mouth. They talk, sometimes about work, mostly about him and his conquests Stateside, and Alice can't help but roll her eyes. "You're not young any more, you know," she often chastises him.

He laughs in her face, mouth open and teeth flashing, just like he used to whenever wee little Alice told Dad a good joke. "I'm not, but you are," he tells her, then sombers. "Have any plans?"

Alice doesn't, which is what bothers her now as she kneels before her son's grave. The wound is still there, and it always will be, but it has scabbed over enough that Alice can now run her fingers over it without incurring its twinging stab of pain. But she knows, as much as she knows that she is her father's daughter, that staying in Cardiff and working for the very organisation that had caused the wound to begin with will do nothing to ever help it heal.

There is the crack of a foot on a branch behind her, and Alice whirls around, wincing and throwing up a hand to block the midday sun from her eyes. There is a woman standing behind her, but with the sun in her face Alice can only see the outline, of tight-fitting jacket and trousers with a bulge at the hip where a gun might be and a ponytail that casually flips to one side. "Yes?" Alice says to the woman, confused. "Did you need something?"

"Yeah, sorry, it's just—well, we should've met, earlier, but we didn't. Long story. Timey-wimey and all that." The woman holds out her hand, and without seeing her face Alice can tell she is grinning. "I'm Jenny. Pleased to finally meet you, Alice—"

"Just Alice," Alice interrupts, and when she takes the other woman's hand they clasp each other like old friends, and that is when Alice knows exactly what she had been missing, all this time.

She truly is her father's daughter, after all.


End file.
